Naturalism, especially observing amphibians in the wild. My little Nico loves Biology. This morning he tore me away from my Internet habit to show me a series of fossil crustaceans -- screenshots he'd taken from his current favorite David Attenborough D.V.D.

Q5. If you could change one thing about the “atheist community”, what would it be and why?

I'd like to see more emphasis on charity and volunteer work. Belief in God makes it easier to say "I have no choice but to donate 10% of my income," but if you know that you have to rely on yourself, you often say "I have to be sure I'm providing for my family's future first, and we'll see what's left..." But we have to make it a priority to think about humanity's future.

Q6. If your child came up to you and said “I’m joining the clergy”, what would be your first response?

What? Whatever happened to becoming a Biologist???

Q7. What’s your favourite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?

That atheism is a ("fundamentalist") "religion" which requires just as much "faith" as belief in God. If you have to call atheism a religion in order to discredit it, then religion has already lost. (See It takes a lot of faith to believe that!!!)

11 comments:

Just as the opposite of love is not really hate but indifference, I think the best definition of the opposite of theism is "apatheism": It's not that you do or do not believe in god, you just don't care. Or you can do as the Japanese do, and believe in whatever god is the most convenient at the moment.

I know people who are apatheists (like Tom, for example). I wouldn't necessarily say that's the opposite of theism, though. There exist people who admit to belief in God if pressed on the matter but mostly don't really care either way. For myself, I'm clearly not an apatheist, otherwise I wouldn't be bothering with this meme. ;^)

Apatheism arguably goes one step further; it posits that if there is a God, He doesn't care either.

In the end, I go with agnosticism, since it's the one position I'm completely sure of. For me, atheism ultimately gets you nowhere since it seems to always end up with arguments just as silly as those coming from theists.

Re: Apatheism arguably goes one step further; it posits that if there is a God, He doesn't care either.

I think that's a different thing entirely. To me an apatheist is someone who doesn't posit anything at all about God because s/he doesn't find the question of God interesting or useful.

Re: In the end, I go with agnosticism, since it's the one position I'm completely sure of. For me, atheism ultimately gets you nowhere since it seems to always end up with arguments just as silly as those coming from theists.

Another roundabout way of granting that the arguments in favor of God's existence are silly. This battle has clearly been won. ;^)

But really, it's not a question of arguments against the existence of God or of any kind of beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt proof of God's non-existence. It's just a question of lack of evidence for God's existence. As with a lot of questions in life, even if you don't have 100% certainty, it makes sense to look at the evidence and decide which conclusion seems more likely.